Traps, Catchphrases and a Release – Our Links of the Month

What has inspired Age of Artists in the last month? Exciting, entertaining and controversial findings from the World Wide Web. Our Top Picks of the Month:

Are you stuck in the comfort zone? HBR-Autor Roger Martin attended his thoughts another topic that moves managers around the world: Strategic Planning. It seems to be the Holy Grail of all management tools. It is everywhere and overrated –Martin says. His article with the provocative title The Big Lie of Strategic Planning tells about the traps of strategic planning and how to escape them with a handful of rules. We don’t want to reveal too much, but it seems that we need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive about our strategy, because true strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices, ergo leaving the comfort zone.

Last month we were happy to release our research essentials on how to develop a culture that grows and nurtures creativity and innovation – on an individual and organizational level. This document represents a condensed version of our research and an invitation for dialogue and exchange. Our investigation was realized between October 2013 and July 2015 and continues on. Up to now we conducted interviews with close to 50 artists from all genres to learn about their work in general, and more specifically their mindset, approaches, practices and action paths. We engaged as well in conversations with individuals that work at the intersection of art and other disciplines, and with leading scientists in various disciplines such as brain science, sociology, education, art and design, and creativity research. Finally we also engaged with business executives in various industries to find out about their needs, expectations and current thinking.

Transparency is one of the catchphrases in management these days. And of course transparency has found her way into working life. Ethan Bernstein, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, writes about the outcome of his research of empirical evidence that transparency improves performance in organizations. He tells about four types of boundaries that establish certain zones of privacy within open environments: boundaries around individual teams, boundaries between feedback and evaluation, boundaries between decision rights and improvement rights and boundaries around carefully defined periods of experimentation – zones of time. Read his article The Transparency Trap in Harvard Business Review (HBR) and find out, how the right amount of transparency and privacy affects our innovation, productivity and performance.

If you are a visual type then maybe this framework by the Luma Institute calls your attention. The global education company teaches people how to be more innovative by applying the discipline of human-centered design. With this framework they provide a decision guidance for all the available tools and methods that wants to help innovators discover what users want and how to deliver on their expectations.